Xbox's Game Pass Struggle: Why Gamers Aren't Interested in Hundreds of Games

While head of XBOX Asha Sharma is trying to find reasons for the decline in Game Pass subscribers and figure out how to regain interest in the service and make it more profitable, senior analyst at Circana agency Mat Piscatella offered his own perspective on the problem.

He believes that the main factor lies in the very concept of the service, which was once formulated by Phil Spencer as "Netflix for gamers." XBOX invested huge amounts of money to add as many games as possible to the catalog and even bought studios for this purpose. But it turned out that most users do not need a countless number of games since there is time for only a few titles per year, and simple arithmetic tells them that it is cheaper to buy these few games at full price or during a sale than to pay for a subscription every month.

I believe that Game Pass never managed to reach the necessary number of subscribers simply because the mass user does not need hundreds or thousands of games. The average player buys one or two games a year, spends all their free time in their favorite "endless" game, and that's where their interests end.

Game Pass managed to attract the attention of the most passionate enthusiasts, but that's not the audience to work with if the goal is to gain tens or even hundreds of millions of subscribers.

At the same time, the reputable analyst does not see how XBOX can increase the Game Pass audience. Piscatella notes that the company tried to attract the public with major releases, then shifted focus to conceptual indie projects, and both approaches proved ineffective.

I don't see any way out of the current situation for them. The Xbox team was tasked with turning the gaming business into a subscription model similar to many other Microsoft products. And, in my opinion, they have already tried practically all the options that could have worked.

One of Asha Sharma's first decisions was to reduce the cost of Game Pass by excluding newer parts of Call of Duty, and recently the company launched free cloud gaming with ad viewing, but too little time has passed for these steps to affect the overall picture. Sharma is trying to lead the company out of a deep crisis, got rid of four studios and is conducting a "reboot", but whether this will make XBOX more profitable and Game Pass more popular — we won't find out for at least a year.

Source: @matpiscatella.bsky.social